How to Use this Page [28 May 2011]

Option #1:

Find immigrant who was documented to come on a particular ship. ("Odyssey" for example)

Edit the person page for the head of the family to include immigration information and a template {{OdysseyYearInfo}}. (If the person came with their parents, just add the person to the category -- [[Category:Odyssey (YYYY) Passengers]] -- and put the template on the page for the family and/or father.))

NOTE: If the ship name has an "&" in it (such as "Susan & Ellen") spell the word out (i.e., "SusanandEllen") in just the template name. The category page will use the full name as you write it in the fields on the template.

Edit the template . You can get to the template by clicking on the red link that is generated when you save the person page. If a template appears at that point, it has already been created. You can edit it by using the link that will now appear at the bottom of the page when you edit this person.

If the template has already been created, edit it to include a link to the passenger you are working with.

Add line to this page, in proper order, that links to the ship category.

Transcribe the full list of passengers (with source info) on the Category Talk page for the ship.

In either case:

When you find information about a voyage in person pages that doesn't really belong there -- up to and including passenger lists and long accounts from published sources, move such information either to the ship's template page (it can be used in the brief summary, or to supplement the passenger list) or to the category page.

Use the most reliable sources possible. Before using Option 1, confirm that the immigrant appears on an original or reliably researched passenger list, and is not just claimed as a passenger in another source. Many histories claim that immigrants sailed on particular ships with no contemporary documentation.

Need formatting help [9 February 2009]

Hi Amelia,

I'm still struggling with this wiki-table-code. I'm sure it has to do with line-wrapping but I'm not sure how to fix it. Stuff that should flow in a paragraph is breaking up over columnar cells, and font size is changing. I'm sure it has to do wiht line wrap. Could you please help me fix this? (and let me know how to avoid this in the future?) See Template:UnknownShip_March1631Info . THANKS! jillaine 22:00, 9 February 2009 (EST)

Please check out draft Great Migration Portal page [16 February 2009]

Nice job! A few things... Since naming this area Great Migration Ships, I've had the thought that the Puritans probably don't have a monopoly on the term. A glance a Wikipedia lists several, and it looks like a page like the Puritan one is probably the only genealogically significant one that used ships, but in order to at least distinguish the portal from the African-American migrations, this portal and the category should perhaps be called "Puritan Great Migration." Also, we should decide how to deal with the Puritan Great Migration category. Should it just have subcategories (including 1620s and 1630s (which I still think are useful because they set a pattern for later, and because I think there's a substantive difference in experience between the two groups))? Should it just have non-people pages (i.e. sources, articles), with all the people in the appropriate ship and/or decade category? I think that might be most useful, since otherwise the 40k people are going to get a little nuts, and push any ability to see sources off the page. In any case, the "to do" should probably include "If you know what ship your ancestor came on, add the category "Ship Name (Year) Passengers" (and we'll have to figure out a place to list the exceptions).--Amelia 11:32, 16 February 2009 (EST)

Great ideas. I concur with them all. Therefore, I will:

Rename portal to "Puritan Great Migration" (or should it be "Great Migration (Puritan)" to align with Wikipedia naming?)

Change "Things to do" not to encourage placing "Category:Puritan Great Migration" (or "Category:Great Migration (Puritan)" ala wikipedia?) but as you say, to place their Great Migrating person in the appropriate ships list.

QUESTION: How do we categorize the people who are not associated with a particular ship? I.e., we don't know what ship they came over, but we want to indicate they were part of the Great Migration?

I've just been putting them in the category for the decade. At some point perhaps they can be subdivided by year or something, but for many of them that may not ever work, so I think that should at least be an option. If there's some other way to categorize them, we can make an exception to the general ship rule, too (like the Winthrop Fleet, where we don't really know who came on which ship.)

And I prefer Puritan Great Migration, though I don't feel strongly about it.--Amelia 14:55, 16 February 2009 (EST)

Hierarchy of Great Migration Categories [16 February 2009]

Category:Mayflower Passengers <- Use this a) when one or more Mayflower passenger(s) is(are) the focus of the Source; or on the person page of a Mayflower passenger. Do not use for Mayflower descendants.

Wishlist

as much as I think it would be interesting to tag everyone who is a Mayflower descendant on their person page, I think that's more than we want to bite off; plus with no way to see what the line is specifically (I'm waiting for a fun programming trick), it's of limited use.--Amelia 16:10, 16 February 2009 (EST)

Notes [16 February 2009]

I backed out the "Category: Mayflower" tags I added (making them "Category:Mayflower Passengers" except for the Societies of Descendants and The Genealogies of Descendants. In the latter case, I only gave them "Mayflower Passengers" if the title mentioned a Mayflower passenger.

Right now, people who are categorized to a ship also appear in the decade category. I started this in the 1620s, when it was a relatively small group, and I thought it might be interesting to be able to see the different people. But with the 10s of thousands every other decade will hold, I'm not so sure. One thing to do if we're going to keep it that way might be to have the categories list by last name (so you could easily see, for example, all the Bradfords that came close in time), but that would require touching every person and fixing the current category reference, unless there's some way to do that through the ship template. The other idea would be to have only uncategorized people show up in the decade category, which would be something of a research flag on those people. I might lean somewhat toward the latter since it's less work!--Amelia 15:03, 16 February 2009 (EST)

Questions [17 February 2009]

What else should be part of this hierarchy?

Amelia: You recommended that we put sources and articles in the "Ship (Year) Passengers" category so we don't have duplicate categories floating around. [Amelia: not sure when we'd use "Ship (Year) Passengers" on Sources or Articles? I see it for people, but not for Sources or Articles; please explain. -- Jillaine

(Apparently my answer to this got lost at some point... You'd use it in that rare case where there happens to be a book (or someone who is interested enough to tell the story in an article) about a crossing or a group of people who came over together. The major cases I can thing of would be Winthrop Fleet and Mary and John, but they're already special cases. But that's kind of the point -- since they are so rare, then there's no sense in having a rule that creates a new category for such things.--Amelia 00:14, 17 February 2009 (EST))

Amelia: Please look at Person:Nicholas_Trerise_(1). I'd categorized him before this whole discussion. He currently has three categories. Before I clean him up, are we really saying that instead of three categories, he's only going to be in one-- in this case the "Planter (1634) Passengers"? Just double-checking. -- jillaine 17:11, 16 February 2009 (EST) -

I don't think this was decided. The current practice is that the templates generally have the decade category on them. But if we think that's going to be too many people in one category, then we delete that and people who were on a known ship aren't in the decade category. And actually, unless Trerise actually settled here for at least a while, he wouldn't be an immigrant anyway, although he could still be a passenger.--Amelia 00:14, 17 February 2009 (EST)

Actually, this whole exercise had me dig into Trerise. Interesting story, and yes, he did settle in Massachusetts.

Should distinguish the Mayflower descendants societies from the Mayflower descendants genealogies? -

I know not nearly enough about either to make a decision.--Amelia 00:14, 17 February 2009 (EST)

Okay, I'll sit with it for awhile and see if something profound occurs to me. Perhaps Ronni has a suggestion. -- jillaine 22:36, 17 February 2009 (EST)

New England only? [22 February 2009]

Amelia, your opening paragraph on this Article indicate ships to New England Colonies only. This is the focus of my own research as well, but is it technically accurate if we're referring to the Puritan Great Migration? (Which raises the issue of renaming the page...)

I ask because NEHGR vol 14 (see p 347 for example) published lists of passengers on ships bound for Barbadoes in the 1630s; other volumes include lists of passengers bound for Virginia-- also during the Puritan Great Migration period. Some researchers have demonstrated that some of these passengers (especially those bound for Barbados) ended up in New England, but I would imagine that some amount stayed in the original destination. I would also imagine that some Puritans ended up in Virginia (however, I know nothing about early Colonial VA outside of what I was taught in elementary school).

How do we decide which ships to include and exclude? (I realize this raises the difference in our approaches-- I'm ship-focused; you've been individual-focused.)

Lastly, when I initially expressed interest in helping you with this page, you wrote that you didn't have a lot of time to focus a lot of attention on this project. My apologies if I am distracting you from other priorities.

That never really occurred to me. I've never seen it actively discussed with regards to Virginia or Barbados. Perhaps as a technical matter, but not in terms of what that meant to the settlement of either place. On the other hand, I have no ancestors in either place, so it's not like I'm looking for it. Since it's the term both NEHGS and Wikipedia use to refer exclusively to New England, I'm happy leaving it the way it is until someone can explain that there's a connection that makes it worth expanding the definition (and the work).--Amelia 11:49, 22 February 2009 (EST)

Nice clean-up work, Amelia [21 February 2009]

Thanks for the clean up work on all those rows I added. I have this fear that I am creating more work for you and others. What's both a joy and a challenge about wiki collaboration (as we're clearly seeing over at the naming conventions discussion) is the balance between individual initiative (and approach/preference) and community collaboration. -- jillaine 09:03, 21 February 2009 (EST)

Added Hopewell 1635 [22 February 2009]

Amelia, I just added with an associated template. Still struggling with template formatting. FYI, I'm working through NEHGR volume 14 which publishes passengers lists of many early ships. -- jillaine 08:19, 22 February 2009 (EST)

I made a change on the category hierarchy. But one thing, do we really want individual people to be in the Puritan Great Migration category? That would seem to have double the problem of the decade categories that we already decided wouldn't included individual people.--Amelia 00:17, 26 February 2009 (EST)

What do you think of the changes I made? -- jillaine 14:22, 26 February 2009 (EST)

Try this [7 March 2009]

After some template syntax learning, I created this: Template:Ships. I used it here Template:SusanandEllen1635Info, and it seems to work well. You only have to fill in the data, and the table formatting is in the main template.--Amelia 20:39, 7 March 2009 (EST)

NICE work, Amelia! Thank you. This should make it a lot easier for me and others. I appreciate your partnership on this. -- Jillaine (ooops: jillaine 21:10, 7 March 2009 (EST))

List of Ships List Templates [31 July 2011]

Amelia, I needed to create the following for myself; perhaps you have one, too. Here's an alpha list of the templates we have so far. I pulled it by searching the Template space for the word "info". I use it to check against when I find a ships list elsewhere to see if we've got it. Notice that I used upper or lower case "i" for "info" to let us know when the template name (no spaces) uses upper or lower case. It would be great to keep this list updated as we add more. Jillaine 08:17, 2 November 2009 (EST)

Brevis in 1638? [4 November 2012]

I've seen reference here and there to a 1638 ship of Titchfield residents, the "Brevis". Wondering if anyone has come across reference to this ship OTHER than "William Sabin may have been on such a ship..."